Assembly may return to ground-level

PALMER — Here’s something you don’t see on Mat-Su Borough Assembly packets every day:

“A resolution of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough Assembly testing a new seating arrangement for the assembly.”

That’s a resolution assemblyman Jim Sykes put forward on March 10. It was postponed then but is back again this week.

And while seating arrangements are more the type of thing you might expect to see brides and grooms debating than assemblymen, Sykes said it’s important. His main beef: the seats assembly members occupy sit on a raised area well above the portion of the room the public sits in. He said he’s seen that change in seating arrangements have an effect when he was a reporter in Anchorage, when that city’s assembly met at a building on Tudor Road.

“They had a pretty good conversation. There was as much of a political struggle as there is anywhere, but it was a community conversation,” Sykes said. “When they moved into the Loussac Library Building, where you looked way up at the assembly to supplicate yourselves before the high priests, the conversation got significantly nastier.”

His proposal: have the assembly meet at tables on the ground level until June 16, just to try it out.

A secondary point — that the podium people have to stand at to testify isn’t friendly to people in wheelchairs or people who need to sit during testimony — was already headed toward a solution. Mat-Su Borough Clerk Lonnie McKechnie said the borough has been working on it.

“Just so the members know, we are looking for a new podium for people to stand up and people in wheelchairs,” she said.

As to how much support Sykes could expect, the few assembly members who spoke out on it March 10 gave it a lukewarm reception.

“I just like this facility,” Assemblyman Vern Halter said, comparing the current chambers to ones the assembly met in before an addition was added to the building in 2013. “Do I really like being up quite as high as we are, probably no.”

Assemblyman Dan Mayfield said that Sykes’ plan would be more trouble than it was worth.

“I feel like we are one with the folks whether we sit up here or not. The fact that we have this beautiful dais fully equipped, I think it would really be a bit of a hassle for the clerk staff to be setting up tables specifically for assembly meetings,” he said.

The raised dais has been a topic of conversation since the addition to borough building was completed in October 2013. In fact, it was the first thing then-assemblyman Jim Colver said as he led a tour of the addition.

“We would rather not be up so high,” Colver said in Frontiersman reports from the time. Colver was the driving force behind finding funding for the addition. He recently resigned his assembly seat after being elected to the state House of Representatives in November.

Designers say that to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act requirements, the dais had to be at the level of the old building’s first floor rather than a half-floor down where the audience sits now. Numerous people have since commented at assembly meetings, usually saying the assembly sits up too high.

At any rate, the assembly put off deciding on Sykes’ tables-on-the-floor plan in order to give the public time to weigh in. The meeting is at 6 p.m., tonight.

Also on the agenda are a couple of resolutions with implications for local marijuana policy. Mayor Larry DeVilbiss said that so many people wanted to sit on the marijuana advisory council that he intends to ask the assembly to add some more alternate positions to that body. He also sponsored a resolution putting to a non-binding advisory vote of the Mat-Su Borough the questions of whether to allow local cultivation, manufacture, testing or sale of marijuana.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.